Submission

by Harrison Young

  Allison thought for a minute. “You want me to do it again?” “What do you think?”

  “Someone else would have shot her if I hadn’t, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if you like.” And then, “Perhaps I should have some training.”

  “In due course.”

  “You want me to cool down first?” “Yes.”

  “Back to college?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you be there?”

  “Someone has to give you your ‘A.’”

  “Will you fuck me a lot?”

  “I have other commitments.”

  “Oh.”

  “Get that boy to do it.”

  “I’m not sure… Well, I suppose he’ll know how.”

  “If he doesn’t, get another.”

  “Oh.”

  “You can do anything you want, Allison, so long as you do what I ask, from time to time.”

  15

  Walking home from a long and superior party – or more accurately, walking to the taxi stand at the Hilton because he knew better than to drive – Philip was spoken to by the checked mosque.

  “God is great!” it said, announcing dawn.

  “So He is,” said Philip to himself. The silence crept toward him. There could be no evasion. He’d been given a job to do.

  “God is singular,” said the tower.

  It occurred to Philip that perhaps he has having a religious experience, but then he remembered he was drunk. Nevertheless, when he awoke later in the day, he answered the call.

  What he knew when he awoke, along with thirst and the fleeting thought that there had to be reasons he was drinking so much, was that he must make friends with the crown prince. He also knew he must go a circuitous route. Not via Ian’s.

  Philip had met a chap in a bar once who claimed to have become so disoriented in Saudi, the first time he went there, having arrived from Tokyo, a wrecked career and a weekend with an ex-wife, that he went back to the airport – airports being at that point the only thing that represented home, he’d been in so many of them in the past eighteen months – and hung around for a couple of hours, pretending to wait for the flights they called, and then meditatively rolled up his newspaper and walked to the automatic door, and reentered the heat, waved the taxi drivers away, and walked the three miles back to the hotel where he had had his failure of confidence, getting hot and grimy as he went there, but feeling more certain as he did of where he was, stood in line for a while to check in, which he couldn’t because he had already, pretended to be distracted when it was almost his turn, wandered up to his room, took a shower, slept soundly, and in the next four years made his fortune. Nice chap. Full of shit, but the concept was valid.

  So Philip called a taxi and collected his jeep and went back to the Hilton and the “Brunch 11 to 3” he’d seen advertised in the elevator his first morning in Alidar.

  Brunch was in the bar, an overlarge, low-ceilinged room decorated to look like the inside of a ship as homage to Alidar’s maritime tradition. It was panelled in blond wood. There were mock portholes for windows. The waiters, all of whom were Indian, wore white stewards’ uniforms with maroon piping. The bar itself was circular, handsomely built, and tended by a large Englishman wearing a T-shirt inscribed, “Pope Paul VI American Tour Advance Team.” Around the bar was a ring of stools, and on every stool was a white-robed Arab, most of them Saudis in their early twenties, three or four plainly on the point of passing out. The rest of the room was full of small low tables, most of which were occupied by westerners. Along the far wall was a buffet table – scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, roast beef, Middle Eastern specialties – presided over by a brown man in a scarlet jacket and a turban. Somewhere someone was playing a piano. Philip got a plate of polyglot food and found a table of his own.

  What had he thought of this place when he first arrived? It had felt weird. Happy weird. The whole country was a lark.

  A few months into the adventure, they all seemed foolhardy, like people sharing their last oxygen bottles. Arabs and Europeans alike. No notion of the future. Japanese probably knew. There was a table of them over by the window. Probably got briefings. Two hours before the riots a JAL 747 would arrive and they’d all get on it like the ark. The fucking rest of us, however, should be ashamed. Shoes unshined, weapons uncleaned, no forward patrols. We would collectively get reamed.

  What sort of soldier would His Highness make? How would Sergeant Webster regard him? Sergeant Webster had probably retired. Probably ran a filling station in whatever dusty town he came from. There hadn’t been a Mrs. Webster, though possibly there was now. Probably a good looker, in her forties. Probably someone he’d known twenty years before, who’d been waiting for him.

  Philip had Sergeant Webster’s job now.

  “Hello, there,” said someone, clearly a stewardess. “Weren’t you on my plane?”

  “We all look alike,” said Philip.

  “Don’t frown,” she said. “You might freeze that way.”

  “I like older women,” he said.

  She moved on.

  If I were His Highness, said Philip to himself, I would want to know me. Isn’t that what the king had once said? And if I were shy about it, and not really stupid, simply less infuriatingly smart than the rest of my family, I’d go some place I thought I’d show up, and wait. And if I didn’t show up the first time, I’d try it again. Being an Arab, I would be patient.

  Philip put down his fork, tucked folding money under his plate as a tip, and went downstairs to the parking lot. Cars were still arriving, and he got a bright smile as he gave up his place near the entrance to the hotel and headed his jeep toward the desert.

  His Highness had parked his own vehicle the other side of the rise that made the city disappear, roughly where Philip had encountered his father. He sat in the truck’s shade on a campstool, a sketchpad and box of watercolours in his lap.

  “I thought you ran,” he said, sounding disappointed.

  “I didn’t know you painted,” said Philip.

  “Please don’t tell my sister,” he said.

  He was not a dunce, and not a genius. Nor a soldier. Philip assumed he took after his mother, who must have had something to recommend her, for Mubarek would have had choices. He had a good eye for terrain. He could judge distances, even when there was dead ground. Apparently he did it by observing the amount of haze that intervened. As an artist, he was much more interested in colour than in form. His palate was restricted and subtle. He had been waiting for months.

  “Only on Fridays,” he said. “I have duties other days.”

  “I’m sorry to have kept you,” said Philip, who felt he was speaking to a royal moon creature.

  “Please don’t apologise,” said His Highness. “You have duties too.”

  “Well, I’m here now,” said Philip. “What would you like to know?”

  “What to do.”

  What he meant, it developed, was what to do with his army. His father was no help at all on the subject, evidently, and Ibrahim had been unwilling to discuss the topic with anyone else.

  “We Alidi are warriors,” he said. “My father rules Alidar because our family were the best warriors. It would be disrespectful for me to ask any of his subjects for advice. Even Sheik Fawzi himself. That is why the army and the police are separate. No one without royal blood may command the army. Sheik Fawzi thinks my army is a joke, so he will not let the police be part of it, which is inefficient. I must assume my father has a plan for dealing with Suleiman, but he is keeping it a secret. Or at least he is keeping it a secret from me. All I can do is try to make my army ready.”

  Alidar’s army was in fact a mechanised infantry regiment. It lived in barracks to the south of the city, presumably to be able to secure the airport, and stood guard at the palace. Crown Prince Ibrahim was diligent about visiting it, seeing to it that the soldiers’ uniforms were clean and their vehicles in excellent repair. Being in the army was no
t much of a career. The soldiers were all from poor villages. The officers had been selected for their good breeding and lack of imagination.

  “I think you should take it to the field,” said Philip.

  “What for?” said His Highness.

  “To teach them to hide. Camouflage.”

  His Highness looked troubled.

  “This truck, for example,” said Philip, “which I presume you got from the motor pool, is painted olive drab.”

  “I believe that is the appropriate colour for army vehicles.”

  “Only where there are trees.”

  “Please, what difference does that make?”

  “The reason army trucks are painted green, or green and brown, is to make them blend into their surroundings. Your surroundings are tan and grey. That is how your trucks should be painted.”

  “But then it would be difficult to tell when they are dusty. Dust shows up very clearly on green paint.”

  “With respect, Your Highness, showing up very nicely is a nice way to get dead.”

  His Highness thought about this for a while. “What is your advice?”

  “Repaint the trucks.”

  “Is this something you can advise us on?”

  “Your Highness could probably advise any army in the world on the colours of the desert,” said Philip, looking at the watercolour the young prince had laid aside.

  Ibrahim looked at his pad, and at the truck, and at the wilderness around them, and slowly at Philip, and smiled.

  “This hobby of mine is useful?”

  “It might be.”

  “But where would I find painters? The men would not know how to do it.”

  “Bring them out here. Teach them. Make them do it twenty times if need be. When they have learned how to paint their trucks, they will know how to paint themselves.”

  “Why do you want my men to paint themselves?”

  “Camouflage may be useful, I fear.”

  “The men will think it is silly.”

  “Tell them it is a secret.”

  “And then their sisters will not make fun of them?”

  “More important, it may be a secret.”

  So, one company at a time, His Highness Prince Ibrahim, Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Regiment of Foot Guards (Mechanised), brought his army into the desert, gave them paint pots and instructions, made them do it again, took his young officers, and, when they didn’t see what he meant, his sergeants, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards off in his command truck, and taught them what stuck out and what didn’t, showed them the tricks light played, showed them the different tricks it played at different times of the day, experimented with chalk and sand and gauze, challenged them to sneak up on him as he sat on his camp stool in the blazing heat scanning the ground in front of them, berated them for not using the dead ground, for making noise, for having got sand up the barrels of their rifles. He played blind man’s bluff with the privates, heaving them off a slowly moving truck with a sack over their heads after driving in wild circles over the sand. He challenged them to identify the way home by where the sun was, to tell the direction of the sea by the smell of the breeze. He taught them to tell when others were coming by the behaviour of the birds, taught the young officers who had grown up in town to in the first place see the birds even if they were all the colour of the desert, and by these and other feats of observation and command, came to be regarded as a very magician. Which he charged them not to discuss outside the regiment.

  It turned out, of course, that the well-bred and unimaginative young officers had been the prince’s playmates since the age of two. Their only scrap of self-esteem was knowing him. When he turned out to have unexpected capabilities, they were proud. The private soldiers from the poor villages had in many cases enlisted because of family traditions. Some great uncle had been wily in the nineteen-twenties, some grandfather had been a famous shot. Heredity told. Fading behind boulders, hearing cautious footsteps, waiting motionless in mock ambush – these actions were as natural to them as parade manoeuvres were foolish. Forty miles from town, Ibrahim could see this. Their gracefulness gave him aesthetic pleasure. He got them new uniforms of lovely invisible beige. He got them plastic canteens that didn’t clink. And then he had them pack up their field gear, told them they had done well, and took them back to town to resume their traditional function of mounting guard and looking bored.

  “That will do for now,” said Philip.

  16

  Maloof arranged for Allison to transfer to another college. It was on the East Coast. In preparation for her new surroundings, he sent her to Europe for the summer. On her own. With an ample budget. She devoured the sights, read history books at night, chose each new destination only when she had finished with the city she was in – and got pretty used to luxury hotels.

  He’d told her to be in Geneva on August fifteenth, and sure enough, when she got to her suite, he was there. He made her undress at once, teased her that she was getting fat (which wasn’t true), ordered dinner, made her stay in the room when the waiter rolled in the table – which excited her enormously but didn’t appear to affect the waiter at all – made her sit with her hands in her lap as he cut up her food and fed her each bite, told her he was pleased to see her, made her describe everything she’d seen and learned, asked her if he could stay the night.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  “Well, it is up to you, you know.”

  “I’ve been dying to see you.”

  “Are you rested?”

  She said she was.

  “Good, because what I would like to enjoy tonight is your obedience. I would like you to stand beside the bed while I sleep.”

  “Oh.”

  “I am very tired,” he said. “You may put on a robe if you wish. But then stand right there. In the morning I will tell you where you are going next.”

  Standing still for eight hours was perhaps the hardest thing Allison had ever done. He hadn’t told her not to fidget, or scratch her nose, but she made a game of not doing so. There was a clock on the mantelpiece, but she made a game of not looking at it. She was extremely curious what he would tell her in the morning, so she made a game of not thinking about it. Eventually she became exhausted, and was forced to fantasise. Six hundred outrages later, it was morning and Maloof opened his eyes.

  “Good girl,” he said.

  Where she was going next was to the airport, and a series of flights, ending in a country she had practically never heard of, called “Alidar.”

  “I want you to have some training,” he said, “to go with your determination.” They purchased tourist visas, rented a car, and drove into the desert, were met by some men in a truck, rode for about an hour, changing clothes in the dark in the back, got out, walked for three hours up into what were not quite mountains with one of the men, were passed on to other men, and finally arrived at a sort of encampment with guards. For the next three weeks, mostly existing on very strange food and without enough sleep, Allison received weapons training. Old beat-up rifles, pistols, a machine-gun (only briefly), other pistols, and finally a new rifle with a telescopic sight. When she had become proficient, to use one of Maloof’s favourite words, she was taken to a hilltop three hours’ journey from encampment, and allowed to watch a person walk into the crosshairs. This time it was a man, which was fine. Maloof explained his transgression to her later.

  Allison knew, because she was an intelligent young woman, that killing people was likely to become addictive. Especially this way. But someone else would do it if she didn’t.

  “I want you to have the experience,” Maloof said. “I enjoy watching you open yourself to each new challenge I give you. I enjoy watching you mature.”

  “I seem to be able to do it,” she said, meaning primarily hit the target.

  “Yes,” said Maloof. “You are becoming a professional.”

  “Oh.”

  “There are very few people in the world who do this sort of work, Al
lison. Many of them are unstable. Most of them are known. You are entirely stable. No one knows but you and me.”

  Allison looked around at the bearded men in robes.

  “Oh, these people are mine,” said Maloof. “They are even more discreet than a Swiss hotel.”

  Back at college – her new, expensive private college – Allison enjoyed thinking about how incomprehensible her secret life would be to her new friends, and especially the boys she dated. She enjoyed becoming, more and more perfectly, a nice girl – dressed the part, allowed herself to be kissed on the steps of her dormitory when they walked her home, charmed their parents at parties after football games, was popular if a little standoffish. She was politely uncommunicative about her own family: parents dead, money not a problem, an aunt somewhere. No one pressed.

  The boys Allison dated were also nice. In her senior year, one was so nice that she made him undress and did to him some of the things Maloof had taught her. He was speechless. He tried to reciprocate, but she wouldn’t let him.

  “I get all the pleasure I need from giving you pleasure.” That wasn’t true, but it was interesting, watching him passively accept her attentions, week by week, until she decided she’d better break off the relationship.

  He was really upset. “You’ve treated me like a plaything,” he said. That stung, because it was true.

  “I like you a lot, Tommy. That’s why I’ve tried to be nice. But I’m not being fair.”

  “Are you a lesbian?” he said.

  “I wish it were that simple.”

  “How can I help?”

  “You can’t,” she said, “and I would prefer that you not try.”

  He was close to tears, and to be honest so was she. Being the recipient of enormous amounts of sexual pleasure did not, evidently, prevent a boy from falling in love with you.